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Authors: Catriona McPherson

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BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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Bella Aitken was running her hands over the walls, searching for a light switch.
‘I don’t even know if there
is
electric light,’ she said. ‘It’s been years since I was up here. Ah!’ There was a snap as she threw the switch and revealed the landing in the cold plain light of an unshaded bulb near the ceiling.
Someone – a woman – was lying crumpled on the floor at the base of the opposite wall, with her head propped up at an awkward angle on the skirting board. She was looking at the open lift door, or so it seemed until I stepped closer and saw that her eyes were dull and blank, and then I noticed that her head, one side of her head, was wrong in a way I did not want to look at after the glance that made me flick my eyes away. They took in a dark stain blooming on the brown distempered wall above her and running in trickles down towards the floor.
Stupidly I thought to myself, if she fell against the wall and cut her head, what was that noise? For some reason I was creeping up to her on tiptoe and I was right beside her before I took in what was on the other side of her face: a round dark hole in her temple, and some strands of hair had fallen against it and were clinging there.
‘Mirren,’ said Bella’s voice behind me, almost as quiet as breathing.
Both of the girl’s hands were empty, lying there flung out with the fingers curled up. I knelt and felt under her skirt at the right side but there was nothing there.
‘Is she . . . was she left-handed?’ I asked. Bella Aitken said nothing. So, holding my breath, I reached under her body at the left side trying not to look at where drops of blood had fallen. I could feel her warmth through her clothes as I scrabbled around under her. She shifted a little, slumping further towards the floor, and I drew my hand away, knowing that the police would not want to hear that I had moved her.
‘Mirren,’ said Bella, just as quiet but with a high, strained note as if she were very softly singing. I looked round at her and saw that she was swaying back and forward.
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said, ‘please don’t faint. Please go back down and tell . . .’ I ran over them all in my mind. ‘. . . Tell Mr Muir to telephone to the police, and see if you can stop anyone else coming up here. Do you understand?’
The firm voice, or perhaps just being given a job to do, rallied her and she tottered back to the lift, hauled the door closed and took the groaning old carriage on its way.
In the silence I made myself look at Mirren Aitken’s face again. She was – or had been – very pretty, the sort of girl suited to the fashions of the day, with a heart-shaped face, softly waving hair and a slight, supple figure. Only now that figure was bent at ugly and impossible angles, the soft hair was matted with blood and worse than blood, and the face was a mask carved from bleached wood, unmoving.
‘You poor child,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said a voice, very quietly. I leapt backwards, only just managing not to fall, and peered at where it had come from: a dark corner beyond the reach of the feeble light bulb.
‘Mrs Jack?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said the voice again. I reached up to the bulb and swung it on its cord, trying to see her. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her legs splayed out like those of a rag doll.
‘Mrs Aitken,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
Abigail Aitken lifted her hand and showed me a revolver, so heavy for her that it wagged from side to side in her grip. She looked at it as though seeing it for the first time.
‘It’s Jack’s,’ she said. ‘I shot Mirren and now she is dead and they’ll hang me and I shall be dead too.’
‘Put it down, Mrs Aitken,’ I said, concentrating on keeping my voice very gentle and steady. ‘Put the gun down on the floor.’
‘You don’t need to worry,’ she said, looking at the revolver again. ‘I can’t turn it on myself. I tried and I don’t have the courage.’
‘So can you put it down and just slide it away? I’ll take care of it for you.’
‘No, I want to hold on to it for now,’ she said, but at least she put her hand back down into her lap and I thought I could see that her grip loosened. ‘That would be the best thing.’
I kept my eyes on her, but I cocked my head up to the side and felt a warm rush of relief pass through me, leaving me tingling. Very faintly, in the distance, the piercing squeals of police whistles had begun.
3
Then followed an endless carnival of horrors, staged in three new galleried circles of hell and peopled by grotesques and ghouls too many to count. Or so it seemed as I lived through it and remembered it later. The Dunfermline City Police had turned out in their entirety and would not let anyone leave until all had been questioned, so the crowds continued to mill, weeping and shrieking, craning and muttering, some of them still trying to swap those tokens for jubilee prizes from the roulette wheels. Then as the afternoon wore on they grew restive, beginning to complain, beginning to make up their own stories since no one would tell them what had happened. Grimly, the constables wrote out names and addresses, double-checked who had been where and what they had heard and seen, until slowly, eventually, Aitkens’ revolving door began to turn again, spitting out chagrined witnesses in weary ones and twos, to take the news and all the stories they had made out into the town and spread them there.
The family, exalted guests and staff were treated rather better but for all of that fared rather worse, corralled first in the haberdashery and then in the back office regions, with glasses of water and talk of tea, but with two constables watching them and deaf ears listening to their fading pleas and their growing anger.
The Provost, his lady and the boys were not kept long, to be sure; innocent youth, high office, and the fact that ‘Netta’ was the sister of a sergeant being sturdy claims to gentle treatment, it seemed.
‘I told them what they asked me, Mrs Aitken dear,’ said Mrs Provost – I never did learn her name, ‘but not a word more. They’ll not get gossip from me.’ Mary shrank under the assurances and I felt for her. That ‘dear’ spoke volumes; leather-bound, hand-tooled, gilt-edged volumes. The kind reference to ‘gossip’ did the same: Netta had a hold over Mary Aitken now upon which she would coast along for ever.
‘Least said, soonest mended,’ said the Provost. ‘I’ll bid you good day, Mrs Aitken, and thank you for all the civility you’ve shown me and mine.’ This had a decided air of final summary about it and one inferred that whatever tradition of friendly warmth had culminated in the Provost’s speech today the acquaintance was now over, finished off as rapidly and effectively as a new horseshoe plunged into the cold water of the smithy’s pail.
‘I’ll jist see youse out,’ said the constable.
He soon returned and it became clear that the Lawson family could expect no such favours. That is, Lady Lawson was handled with kid gloves and forelocks were tugged almost out at their roots around her; likewise the two younger sons, although I thought I could detect a more practical, a more instrumental, source for the swiftness with which they were ground through the mill and released from its workings. The police sergeant and constable concerned, I rather thought, spotted early on – or perhaps knew of old (Dunfermline is a smallish town) – that these two wilting, blinking objects did not have the brains to be sensible witnesses to a crime which did not involve them. When it came to the eldest son, though, the constable was a model of thoroughness, chewing surprisingly long and hard to see if there were any useful meat on the boy’s spindly bones.
This was puzzling; young Mr Lawson had been in full view of scores of onlookers throughout the crucial time and he, no less than his brothers, had clearly been dragged along to the jubilee by his mother. Why anyone would think he was a named cast member with a speaking part in this tragedy was beyond me. And the mystery only deepened when I began to see the looks which flew around like shuttlecocks, batted from Mary Aitken to Lady Lawson, to the boy and back again.
When Roger Lawson, with stern glares and injunctions not to go on any journeys from home, was finally let go, the sergeant turned to the managerial staff: Mr Muir standing to attention with just his mouth trembling as he told all he knew; Miss Hutton weeping silently, the tears splashing onto her corsage; and Mrs Lumsden clasping her by her bony shoulders and shushing like a nursemaid, returning glare for glare until the sergeant relented and let all three of them leave.
Now we came to it; it was the family, of course, who interested me, the prospect of the family being questioned and having to give answers which had held me here all the long hours since I had stood watching Abigail Aitken cradling the gun in her lap, looking at her daughter, dry-eyed, expressionless, her chest rising and falling only a little and very slowly, as though she were enjoying a light sleep instead of waiting for her life to tumble down around her.
I shall never forget the moment when the heavy tramp of boots on the stairs stopped and the policeman joined us on the landing, for it is not often that one sees courage laid out with so little pomp, as though it were an everyday matter to be a hero. He was in his twenties, large and gangling, with a very new haircut and the aftermath of a very inexpert morning shave. He strode into the light, looked at me and then down at Mirren. He frowned and I saw his hand go for his truncheon but I nodded towards the corner where Abigail Aitken sat, where I was still training the light of the bulb, my arm aching from being held high above me. He turned, his boots squeaking against the lino, and she raised the gun again and pointed it towards him.
‘Now, now, Mrs Aitken,’ he said. ‘Nane o’ that. You dinnae want to be at that game.’ And without hesitating he walked towards her, the same heavy, measured tread that I had heard ascending, squatted down, shook a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and took the gun from her hand. Behind his back, with marvellous dexterity, he wrapped the thing and laid it aside then, like a considerate beau helping his sweetheart to her feet at a picnic, he took her hands in his and rose gently until both were standing.
‘I’m sorry aboot this noo, Mrs Aitken,’ he said, and then he wrapped just one of his large hands around both of her small ones, unclasped a pair of handcuffs from his belt and, turning her away, fastened them behind her.
That was the end of tranquillity though. More feet were pounding up the stairs and I could hear the lift wheezing too and soon it seemed that the landing was full of constables and of shouting and more than one of them retched at the sight of Mirren and had to rush away and one of them grabbed me roughly around the upper arms and frog-marched me to the top of the stairway, until another stopped him and said he should wait and then the inspector came and the rushing, shouting men turned quiet and shuffled, looked for jobs to do and failed to find them, so only idled like cattle herded against a gate. And through it all Mirren lay with her eyes half-open and her neck bent so uncomfortably up against the skirting that one longed to move it and set a pillow under her head, but the inspector did not even touch her, only squatted and peered, and shouted at the herd of jostling constables to get out of the way, go downstairs and try not to step in any dust or handle the banisters on the way. Eventually he turned and looked over the four of us remaining.
‘Take Mrs Aitken downstairs, McCann,’ he said to the first young constable.
‘Abigail,’ I began, but the inspector interrupted me.
‘Don’t talk to the prisoner unless you want to say it again in the court,’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Inspector, you should know, I think, that this young man of yours was quite splendid. Just terrific.’
‘Naw, Mrs,’ said the constable. ‘No’ really. Only jist Mrs Aitken wis ma Sunday school teacher and I ken her. She’d nivver harm a fly.’
‘If you’ve finished your wee chat, then,’ said the inspector and Abigail was led away. The inspector turned to look at the bloodstain on the wall and spoke over his shoulder to the constable who still had me in his grip.
‘Escort Mrs Gilver to somewhere nearby and find her a seat. And for goodness’ sake, boy, stop manhandling her. Don’t you ever read the papers?’ He looked at me again, unsmiling, and not I thought only because of Mirren lying there. He did not approve of my sort, I could tell.
‘Is this why you’re here?’ he said. ‘If I find out you knew this was coming and didn’t say . . .’
‘I knew nothing until two hours ago.’
‘And what did you hear then?’
‘That Mirren Aitken had gone missing. My first advice – the first words out of my mouth – were that the family should ring the police. Ask them and they’ll tell you so.’
‘Aye, well,
you’re
all right then,’ said the inspector and turned away.
‘What a bloody nerve!’ said Alec, staring at me unbelieving. I had withstood the inspector and then the hours of hell without a tremor, but Alec’s sympathetic outrage undid me and my eyes filled with tears. ‘Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, eh?’ I nodded and tried to resist sinking into self-pity; there was too much to tell.
We were sitting in the coffee room of the Royal Hotel, finally having the rendezvous we had planned. I gathered that Alec had spent quite some time battering against the doors of Aitkens’ like a trapped bee, demanding to be let in and then pleading to be told what was happening by the witnesses as they began to emerge.
BOOK: Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder
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